Rethinking the Beirut bombing, rethinking terrorism: theorising counterviolence

ABSTRACT

After the January 6 attempted armed takeover of the Capitol, many commentators warned that describing the day as an act of domestic terrorism risked intensifying policing regimes targeting communities of colour. Others, however, encouraged the broadening of the domestic terrorism label to include armed white supremacists, given their violent efforts at regime change. Although these interventions have debated both the danger and utility in applying the terrorism label, few have challenged the concept of terrorism itself. Is terrorism a useful interpretive framework to understand the wide-ranging forms of political violence given that label, such as the September 11 attacks, the January 6 events, the Indigenous water protectors contesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Black organisers classified as “Black Identity Extremists” for protesting police brutality? What are the material dangers of collapsing divergent political groups embedded in vastly different power relations under the terrorism label? Guided by these questions, this article examines the evolution of political vies for power between state and non-state actors to theorise counterviolence as a conceptual framework capable of interrogating the relationship between power, politics, and violence to better understand acts facilely reduced to “terrorism.”

KEYWORDS:

• National security
• terrorism
• counterviolence
• January 6

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Political scientist David Rapoport’s influential conceptualisation of the “four waves of modern terrorism” has shaped contemporary understandings of political violence that delegitimize nonstate armed struggles waged by dispossessed people. Rapoport (2004) contends that the “anarchist wave” was the “first global or truly international terrorist experience in history,” followed by the “anticolonial wave” that “began in the 1920s and lasted about forty years,” the “New Left wave” that “diminished greatly as the twentieth century closed,” and, finally, the “religious wave” that emerged in 1979 (p. 47).

2. For more on these classifications, see Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2006). Black Identity Extremists likely motivated to target law enforcement officers. Washington, DC. Retrieved from https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4067711-BIE-Redacted.html and Porter, J. (2017). DAPL SITREP 168. Retrieved from https://theintercept.com/document/2017/06/21/internal-tigerswan-situation-report-2017-02-27/.

3. Different sources have implicated different actors – primarily Muslim militias. For the purposes of this article, the emphasis on Muslim militancy is central to understanding the power dynamics at play between the United States, the United Nations, Israel, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and different Lebanese political parties.

4. The United States has been unable to identify the political organisation responsible for these acts and instead refers to variations of “Islamic Jihad” in its reports (Pearson 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicole Nguyen

Nicole Nguyen is associate professor of criminology, law, & justice and educational policy studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is author of A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland Security in US Public Schools and Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror. Her forthcoming book, Terrorism on Trial: Political Violence and Abolitionist Futures, will be published in Fall 2023 by University of Minnesota Press. [email protected]

Yazan Zahzah

Yazan Zahzah is a community-based researcher and organiser from Southern California. They hold an MA in Gender Studies and currently work as the Director of Community Organising at Vigilant Love as well as a lecturer for the California State University system. Yazan is a longtime member of the Palestinian Youth Movement, a grassroots organisation dedicated to the self-determination of the Palestinian People.